PARIS: France on Saturday said it was recalling its envoy to Turkey for consultations after "unacceptable" comments by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioning the mental health of French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

France and its NATO ally are at loggerheads over a range of issues including maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean, Libya, Syria and most recently the escalating conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

But Ankara has now been particularly incensed by a campaign championed by Macron to protect France's secular values against radical Islam, a debate given new impetus by the murder this month of a teacher who showed his class a blasphemous cartoon.

"President Erdogan's comments are unacceptable. Excess and rudeness are not a method. We demand that Erdogan change the course of his policy because it is dangerous in every respect," a French presidential official told AFP.